Tag: beauty is the beast

Why do you plan to talk about why exactly it seems a genre of manga dominated by female authors contains so much abuse? It’s kind of fascinating to me that women would write characters who seem to DESIRE to be in these sorts of relationships, and I’d be interested in some insights.

This is honestly something I had to do a lot of outside research for because frankly, I don’t get it. My favorite pilot in Gundam Wing was Quatre – “bad boys” have never done it for me. Of course, it would be really assholish to study this phenomenon without trying to understand the “why” as well as the “what”. I’ve found there’s a few reasons:

It’s more interesting

Say what you will about series like Hot Gimmick and Black Bird – they really draw you in. As Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s hard, though not impossible, to write a healthy romance in an interesting, engaging way, whereas even I have to admit that a lot of these melodramas are page-turners, while series about genuine, loving relationships are often hit or miss and even the best ones can get dull if drawn out too long – Kimi ni Todoke, I’m looking at you.

Sorry this update is a week late – it’s con season, and panels and interviews means I have a ton of prep work to do. I’ll be presenting my Romance and Abuse in Shoujo Manga panel at both Otakon and AnimeFest, so come over and say hi if you’re there!

I accidentally rebooted my computer and I hadn’t saved my spreadsheet for quite a while and I lost so! Much! Data!

Why do you think women and girls are too stupid to tell reality from fantasy?

Why would you think –

That’s the only thing I can assume from this blog!

*sigh* Okay.

Apparently my continued pursuit of this topic, along with my lack of more positive coverage of shoujo, has given some people the deeply mistaken impression that I am suspicious or disdainful of it and that I only read shoujo manga with this aspect in mind. In retrospect, I can see where that impression comes from. This has become something of a passion project for me. It’s a topic I consider deeply important, so it’s only natural that I give it a lot of focus. However, because of a number of factors, I haven’t written as much as I wanted to on other, more positive aspects of the demographic. In order to combat this perception, I’m going to include in these posts short essays about shoujo manga and my relationship with it that I hope will clarify things.

The response to my “Romance and Abuse in Shoujo” panel has been consistently overwhelming. The transcripts from my Sakura Con 2016 get new pageviews every day, and every time I present it, I get people approaching me afterward telling me how meaningful they found it. I’m incredibly proud to have put together something that touches people’s lives and resonates with their experiences so strongly.

Many of the series I used in my presentation are older, because those were the ones that made me take notice of this issue years ago. However, I’m not sure how relevant this is to current audiences – how many people sitting and listening are familiar with Boys Over Flowers or Hot Gimmick? New volumes of shoujo manga come out every week, thanks to the hardworking localizers at companies like Viz, Seven Seas, and many others. I curate my reading list pretty carefully, so for years I’ve made a point of looking for series with healthy relationships, or series that are aware of the abusive dynamics they contain. Starting work on this project forced me to engage with series I actively avoided, but what about the ones I just never heard of?

So I started wondering, how do the numbers break down? How many of the series that make it to US shores really do romanticize abuse, and how many don’t? In search of these answers, I’ve started a new side project: “Abusive Relationships in Shoujo by the Numbers.”